Changing the Way Stress is Viewed—Beneficial in the Work From Home Era
With the stay-at-home orders and social distancing regulations brought forth by the Covid-19 pandemic, majority of people are working from home which has created additional stressors in the virtual workplace that were never relevant beforehand. As of June 2020, a Statista survey revealed that 51.4% of employees felt more stressed due to working at home conditions. This has added some complexity to how stress is publicly viewed and how to respond to it. This "stress epidemic" has led some people and organizations to introduce "new" ways to discuss stress, especially within a work performance environment. This complex conversation involves studies done even before the pandemic that revealed the benefits to viewing stress with a different mindset and the impact of programs supporting this approach.
The University of Wisconsin conducted a study in 2012 asking people how much stress they endure and how harmful do they think it is to their health. The people who reported high levels of stress and felt that stress greatly impacted their health had a 43% higher risk of premature death. While the individuals who reported high levels of stress but didn't think it negatively impacted their health, were discovered to have the lowest risk of premature death. These results suggest that the way people perceive their stress affects how it impacts their health—negatively or positively. Taking this into consideration, the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute developed their Corporate Athlete Resilience course to help employees thrive in high stress levels by focusing on creating growth and positive change from stress. The program views stress as a tool to help employees build their resilience to these extreme situations overtime--sort of like an athlete would when training to build muscle. Keeping this comparison in mind, when lifting heavy weights recover time is needed for the muscles to regroup, so they don't burnout. Same thing is required of employees handling extreme stress; a recovery period after so much energy is drained from stress is might be necessary for someone to be able to continue working and growing without crashing. Viewing stress this way, as a way to improve endurance, might be beneficial for highly stressed employees to include in their routine.
Now, forward to 2021 employees are facing additional high stress levels due to the "working from home" normality initiated by the Covid-19 pandemic. A University of Oxford study revealed burnout is at an all time high considering the increase of employees forced to work from home. A big contribution to this burnout syndrome is the long extended hours of computer screen exposure and sitting down. Individuals are having to adapt on their own to an online work environment which they were not trained for. This negatively impacts the way they view their usual dosage of stress, thus like the 2012 survey suggested, could increase their risk of premature death.
A supportive system introduced by employers to ensure the health and wellness of their employees during this time could lead to less burnout symptoms. This tactic has seen positive effects among collegiate varsity eSport players across universities in the USA; 65 varsity players were surveyed by BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine researchers to collect data about the importance of introducing appropriate services to manage eSport players' health. The results revealed the largest complaints were eye fatigue, back and neck pain, and wrist and hand pain from sitting for extended hours in a day in front of a digital screen (similar struggles faced by work from home employees). To help with these health issues and promote better work endurance, the health management team of eSport players worked to create a new model that focuses on health and injury prevention. This way the players are not often struggling with these health complaints that hinder their performance and overtime could lead to a burnout.
This same logic of incorporating a model to prevent injury among eSport players could be replicated in the virtual workplace by employers to help their employees prevent stress induced burnouts. An initiative to support employees with their work from induced stress, similar to the Johnson Corporate Athlete Resilience course, might see major health benefits among many working individuals who are no longer commuting to the office and improve overall work performance. These studies could also provide helpful information to any individual that is experiencing an increase in at-home digital exposure—zoom university students and social media scrollers.
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